This invention relates to a machine translating system of the so-called pivot type.
A machine translating system comprises a source language dictionary for keeping word units of a source language and semantic symbols representative of the respective source language word units. A target language dictionary is for keeping semantic symbols which are common to those kept in the source language dictionary. The target language dictionary is for furthermore keeping word units of a target language for the semantic symbols kept therein, respectively. Each semantic symbol is used as an intermediary between word units of a plurality of languages and will herein be called a pivot word.
Such machine translating systems are generally divisible into three types, namely, transfer, pivot, and hybrid types. The pivot type is proposed by Yorick Wilks and described by him in detail in Chapter Three of a book "Computer Models of Thought and Language" edited by Roger C. Schank and pulbished 1973 by W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, Calif.
With a machine translating system of the pivot type, a first string or sequence of source language word units is subjected to syntaxic analysis and mapped to a source semantic structure representative of the first string by those selected pivot words which are located in the source language dictionary in compliance with the respective first string word units and are representative of a certain number of target language word units. The semantic structure is standardized into a pivot representation by using the pivot words of the semantic structure. The pivot representation is mapped to a target semantic structure by using the pivot words of the pivot representation. The target language dictionary is referenced by the pivot words of the target semantic structure to provide the above-mentioned certain number of target language word units as selected word units. The target semantic structure and the selected word units are used to generate a second string by the selected word units as a result of translation of the first string.
With a conventional machine translating system of the pivot type, the syntaxic analysis often leaves ambiguity in the source semantic structure. In a worst case, the source semantic structure is meaningless. Moreover, it is not seldom that the second string is crumsy as a sentence or a phrase of the target language as will later be exemplified with reference to one of fifteen figures of the accompanying drawing.